


see a dog get paid

by blurhawaii



Category: The Alienist (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 05:10:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14888246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blurhawaii/pseuds/blurhawaii
Summary: He reaches next for the box Laszlo had held out for him, under the shared cover of the table, finger brushing thumb briefly, and tips it open. Inside sits another ring. Pretty in its simplicity; it would have looked quite at home on Mary's hand.Alone in his room, John takes it up and slips it on his finger.





	see a dog get paid

There's something comical about how John came out of this whole thing in possession of two discarded rings. He has to smile to himself because otherwise he’d find it all kind of dour. 

These tragic symbols of unrequited love, doomed love, lost love, that he safekeeps in the pocket resting over his heart.

John attracts it, in all its forms, and holds on long after others have abandoned it.

In the dimming light of his room, after his grandmother has retired to her bed--dropping a kiss and a pat on his cheek as she goes because the sobering shakes have finally deserted him, almost as quick as his recent bout of purpose--he takes both rings out of his pocket and lines them up on his dresser.

Julia's ring--because he still thinks of it as her’s--he spins in place. It's a gaudy thing now that he takes the time to really admire it. He was young and foolish and in love; a much larger concept hastily shoved into too small of an object. He’d placed it in the hands of whores mostly to sully it, just as he believed he was sullied by her. It’s only now that he’s been granted perspective that he can feel the sting of ever having acted so pathetically.

The ring stops spinning, hits the dresser in a dead stop, and taunts him.

He reaches next for the box Laszlo had held out for him, under the shared cover of the table, finger brushing thumb briefly, and tips it open. Inside sits another ring. Pretty in its simplicity; it would have looked quite at home on Mary's hand.

Alone in his room, John takes it up and slips it on his finger.

 

 

Laszlo's not at his desk when John sticks his head in the door, but there's a quiet scratch of pencil against paper that draws John further into the room.

He finds Laszlo tucked away in the corner with a young boy, their heads bent together over a drawing. When John moves closer, he sees that it’s a rather rudimentary drawing, of a person’s face, lacking the finer details to pinpoint it as either male or female.

Without looking up, Laszlo says his name and it’s a pleasant tone, a weightless tone, the tone of a man allowing the past to escape through his open fingers at long last.

The boy continues to mouth something, ignoring John’s interruption, his round face flushed with the effort of pouring over this picture. His eyes are red from lack of sleep and the intensity of his focus unnerves John, an immeasurable amount of hate coming from such a small child, but there Laszlo is, handling him with a gentle touch that belies any similar feelings.

“Try another drawing, Ezra,” Laszlo says, only then lifting his head to greet John. “The closer the likeness, the more receptive you’ll feel.” When Laszlo stands he takes the old drawing, folds it neatly in half, and replaces it with a fresh sheet. Ezra attacks it immediately with his pencil.

“John,” Laszlo says again, and he’s closer now, leaning shoulder first into him as he turns the paper over in his hands. Both hands, John notices, working fluidly together on the same task.

Japheth Dury lies cold on a slab somewhere far from here, cut open and categorised by hands that aren’t Laszlo’s. He’ll be in the ground soon enough, forgotten, save for the people whose lives he touched. John will carry the man with him for the rest of his life, he suspects, just like he does everything else abandoned. Laszlo--well, Laszlo seems revitalised by his absence. Reborn as a man with two working arms and a passion for people unparallelled.

“Stevie told me,” John starts to say, tearing his eyes away from Laszlo’s newly capable hands to meet his eyes. “Stevie told me there was--something of an incident here last night. I only ask because of Joseph, the poor boy, he’s already been through so much…”

“Joseph is fine, John.” Laszlo smiles as fond as he ever does. It’s usually for the benefit of the children and John is unsure how to feel about Laszlo turning it on him. “He’s settling in as well as can be expected. As for the incident--it was minor. A small fire that was seen to before it could really begin.”

Laszlo unfurls the drawing enough that John can see the oval shaped face once again, and under that the word _mother_ scrawled across the bottom in sloppy, childish writing.

“No one was hurt,” he says, “but he needs to find an outlet for his feelings. One that isn’t so potentially lethal.”

Laszlo’s ring sits heavy in John’s pocket--Mary’s ring, he should say, his ring now--and John’s intention in coming here today had been to return it. Julia’s ring he always puts in his pocket out of habit, but he’d brought the box with a purpose.

To put the damn thing in Laszlo’s palm and curl his fingers around it using his own. There’s always time, he’ll say, there’s always potential. Feelings grow where you least expect them, all you have to be is willing. He had practised these lines in the mirror above his dresser, and then again while he was shaving the stubble from his chin.

As he stands here now, love in his heart and not in his hands, the words desert him.

The smell of smoke still lingers on Laszlo, bitter and hot. It’s a sense memory that never leaves you, not once you’ve experienced it. John can feel the residual heat of him licking at his face and neck and it’s horrible and familiar all at once to know that Laszlo feels it all the more keenly.

In a wild moment of allowing himself to follow a thread, John wonders if Mary ever stood before the hearth in Laszlo’s sitting room and simply recalled the burn of the match in her hands. Right before she threw it down.

A monstrous act, John had always thought, at odds with Mary’s gentle hands signing him a greeting, no matter the punishing hours Laszlo kept them both up and working.

When John pictures what they could have been together--lately, it’s while in his room, in the dark, in his own bed, palms flat on the covers by his hips--the picture they make is intimate and secretive. The ending that could have been without the inevitable tragedy; it’s combustible. That hot flash of friction right before the match catches and lights.

“Tell me, Ezra,” John says instead, and it takes all of his willpower not to cup a hand over his breast as he talks. Over his pocket, over tragedy given a solid form. “What does she look like, your mother? Maybe with our skills combined we can capture her well enough for the good doctor’s purpose.”

 

 

It takes a little prompting from Laszlo to get Ezra talking. He starts out slow, reluctant still, in a voice soft enough that John has to hunch over in his chair to hear him. But once the words start to flow, they torrent, and John has a hard time capturing them fast enough, wondering how he can possibly translate _absent_ yet _overbearing_ in a simple caricature.

Laszlo stands behind him the entire time, both of his hands curled around the high backed chair John is sitting in. His bare knuckles square against John’s shoulder blades every time he leans back to draw.

“That’s enough, I should think,” Laszlo says, as John is darkening the space under her eyes at Ezra’s continued insistence. His hands slope down John’s arms before he moves away, over to his desk, and then he’s back, standing in front of them with a book of matches clutched in his withered hand.

Ezra eyes the book hungrily and something in John jolts with a feeling that’s not too dissimilar.

“The desire to seek retribution for what you regard as a mistreating of your feelings, Ezra, it’s a perfectly normal reaction to have.” While he speaks, Laszlo lowers to his knees, extricates a single match from the row and shuffles into the open space between John’s thighs. “To cause pain where pain was done to you, we all fall victim to that urge, I’m afraid.”

Without acknowledging him, Laszlo directs John to lower the drawing, down and out of sight, by the side of his chair. It seems unnecessary, both the touch and the gesture--Ezra only has eyes for the match--but John does it, too stricken by Laszlo’s bold behaviour to question him.

Laszlo continues, giving his full attention to the boy and nothing towards the way John shuffles his feet further apart to give him more room. “You’re here at this institute at the behest of your parents, both your mother and your father, yet it’s only your mother you take issue with.” Laszlo braces his forearm across John’s thigh, needing the traction in order to light the match. In the flickering light it produces, Laszlo looks wild.

“I realise it’s often easier to come to terms with complete neglect than it is someone who tells you they love you and leaves you anyway. Your father and mother, respectfully. Now, there’s a saying; it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But we know better than that, don’t we, Ezra?”

John's eyes slip closed, as if in pain. He reaches blindly for the lump at his breast, this massive overwrought weight disguised as a ring of negligible size, with every intention of trapping Laszlo between his knees and taking up his quaking hand. To slide the band around his finger with the same reverence that he wants to gather Laszlo up in his arms. Anything to get him to stop talking.

The more John thinks about it, the less it becomes about giving the ring _back_ and becomes just _giving_ it. This isn’t Laszlo passionate, he realises, it’s Laszlo unmoored and drifting. Tossing everything overboard in a fit of mania until there’s only himself left to throw. John could throw him a lifeline but he isn’t sure Laszlo would take it. He wants to try anyway.

John brings up the drawing instead. Loops his arm around Laszlo’s back, being careful not to touch him, and offers it to Ezra alongside the match. Laszlo spares him the briefest of smiles, a small delight at having his own mind read for a change. He's hot in the curl of John’s arm, hotter still that he goes right back to ignoring him.

“You want to know how we truly grow, Ezra?” he says, leaning in. The match has burnt down far enough that it's in danger of going out. If Laszlo touched it to the corner of the drawing, it would still catch and light, but the fierce heat is mostly gone. Ezra’s fanaticism has waned along with its life.

When his eyes clear of its hold and his ruddy face tilts up, Laszlo tells him. “By being better than our parents. Do you think you can do that, Ezra?”

Under the unwavering gaze of his absent mother, Ezra nods.

“Excellent.”

With a flick of his wrist the match is out and Ezra’s mother survives another day. Laszlo melts back into him, still on his knees, and John shudders, drops his hand from his chest and dies in her place instead.

 

 

 

Sara goes to kiss his cheek in greeting when they next meet. John ducks down to accept it readily and the hand she uses to brace against his chest hits the lump in his jacket pocket. She pauses, aborts the kiss and pulls back with a curious look on her face.

His grandmother is waiting in the garden for them both and he's happier explaining this here, on the street, rather than where she can listen in and jump to conclusions. John reaches into his jacket and pulls out the small velvet box and Sara's eyes go wide. It turns to panic when he opens it to reveal the ring. John can’t find it in his heart to be offended.

“Stand down,” he says, with a wry smile. “Laszlo gave it to me.”

He turns the box around so that he can admire it in the daylight for a change. Still plainly pretty. Still makes his heart bleed with its sincerity. It has Sara looking wonderfully confused too and good, John thinks, to not be alone in this feeling.

“He tells me it was for Mary.”

“Oh, John,” she says with a reach for the box, “that’s terribly sad.”

John doesn’t disagree, just holds resolutely still as Sara plucks the ring free and turns it over in her hands. She doesn’t attempt to try it on, not even as a fancy, and John wonders if that is a womanly thing or a Sara thing. It had been the first thing John had done, the moment he was alone with it.

“Have you seen him recently?”

“Not since the dinner.” She looks up and makes something of the expression on his face. The indecision at war with the determination. “Should I be worried?”

“I intend to fix it,” he tells her, “as soon as I figure it out. As soon as he tells me how.”

“Oh, John,” Sara says again, the same sadness as before but for a far different reason. She hands the ring back, bypasses the box completely to place it in the safety of his palm.

With just a look, she knows exactly what he does at night, alone in his room.

 

 

Laszlo still likes to remind him that love resides in the brain. _It’s just chemical reactions_ , he assures him, _hardly a mystery when they can be traced as thoroughly as lines on a page_.

He steps in close enough to hand him a book, and then he’s gone again, taking that familiar heat with him. John doesn’t glance at the title, even as he drops it on his dresser later. Just thinks about Laszlo saying _he needs to find an outlet for his feelings_ with the same disinterested clinical tone, and carries the words to bed with him.

John gives the book back after a suitably long week has passed. He didn’t even crack the spine and Laszlo doesn’t ask but as he gives it over, the ring--Laszlo’s ring, Mary’s ring, his ring now--rests on John’s pinkie finger. He’d tried every finger, both hands in a well of desperation, and that’s the one that had stuck.

If Laszlo notices, he doesn’t react.

In his room, in the dark, in his own bed, John takes his hands up from the covers and unbuttons his trousers. He strokes his cock with the same hand and can only feel the ring because he keeps pushing into it. Tightens the curl of his fingers until he can’t ignore it. Until it burns with too much dry friction. Until he comes from it.


End file.
